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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

This clock is great for teaching kids how to tell time! When learning to read a "circle clock", they have a heck of a time understanding what it means when the hour hand is almost but not quite pointing at a number. So when it's 3:45 they will say 4:45 because they know the big hand on 9 means "45" but they get confused because the little hand is almost pointing at 4.

This clock solves that problem.

Anyone know if I can get this as an Apple Watch face?

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> Anyone know if I can get this as an Apple Watch face?

Currently, 3rd parties can't create custom Apple Watch faces.

What's the point of a smart watch if you can't change the dial and face however you want? It's like when carriers wouldn't let you load your own ring tones on to your phone, because they didn't want to cannibalize their own ring tone sales.

even stranger since apple doesn't sell faces (with the exception of the Hermes faces which come with purchase of their obscenely expensive watch bands). seems like something they'd just shoot down in review if something got too close to an Hermes face.

There's so much more to a smart watch than a fully-customizable watch face.

While I fully believe that Apple should open up to third-party faces, I am quite content with the customization options that they offer now.

There may be more, but it includes that functionality at the very least. That would be the absolute base line functionality of a watch that has a bit-mapped display.

I'd argue that the success of the Apple Watch proves that you're incorrect.

Success?

I've never seen one worn in real life.

Personally, they're a less cool version of an 80s swatch.

I see more of them worn than regular wrist watches. Considering they sold more watches than the Swiss watch industry (2019), it's not surprising.

It's the most popular watch in the world.

Yup, one of my favorite parts of having my last smart watch was making it look like a Fallout pip-boy. It would be required for me.

I think they should give us the option to create watch faces, but don't care about it much. It's very far down my priority list of what I want from Apple Watch.

As for the reasons why they don't, my speculation is the following (I'm not defending them): They are worried about custom watch faces that might perform poorly or draw too much battery. Watch is a challenging platform to develop for as watchOS is very protective of its resources and won't hesitate to kill your app. But Apple probably doesn't want to kill the watch face and at the same time doesn't trust the developers to develop their watch faces to Apple's standard.

Any color, so long as it's black. Henry Ford, Steve Jobs.

Is there so much more? Unless using it for sports, it's basically an extension of your phone to serve notifications and that's it.

>What's the point [..] if you can't change

It seems to be part of Apple's strategy, to focus on Out Of The Box experience, not on user configuration. And to the greater point? To make profit. The perfect product is not the point, nor is the perfectly satisfied customer.

> What's the point of

The point of a smart phone is not ringtones. The point of a smart phone is not even being a phone anymore. It's everything else you do with it.

The point of a smart watch is not cool watch faces.

You want skins/customization, which is fair. But you have to admit it's not core functionality.

My guess is that this is likely because of the availability of an always on display. Apple has likely programmed each of the watch faces into the microcontroller that manages that low power mode. The other option would be to wake up the main cpu every time you need to refresh the 3rd party watch face, but that would have a power cost.

> This clock solves that problem.

In English! In Dutch this would actually create a problem, as when it is 3:45 we say it is "15 before 4". I noticed that I actually struggled to interpret the wobbly clock when it was close to changing the hour.

We do this on English too. 3:45 is "a quarter to four."

I always think that the prevelance of saying "three forty-five" is a result of digital watches.

My kids hate the "quarter to four" construction because, in their words, it makes them do math in order to tell time. Which, of course makes me prefer it just to force them to get comfortable with it. I've even pointed out how 60 is nicely divisible by a lot of numbers, so we can say "a twelfth to 4" just to be a pain in the butt. :)

I really think it simply depends on whether you're used to analog or digital. I actually learned to tell time by someone telling me that one side of the clock if the "past" side and the other is the "to" side (a little hand-wavey around 30-40 past). This made sense to me. What was important was the closest hour, and how many minutes (or fractions) past or to it was.

I taught my kids similarly. Starting with the hours, and then "half past" and then "quarter to" and "quarter past."

Only after all that was second-nature did I even explain to them the idea of 60 minutes.

Well not just that. In England at least we generally say "20 to 4", "10 to 4", etc . if we're using a 12-hour clock. If I'm using 24hour we generally just say 1545, etc.

In German and Dutch you also say "half four" which means "half to four" (e.g.: half past three).

Haha! In New Zealand, "half four" would be half past four: 4:30

In western Germany we say "quarter to four" and in eastern Germany we say "three quarters (of) four".

"three quarter four" is also common in austria, but worse (for visitors) is "quarter four" which is a quarter past three.

If my presumption that analog watchfaces are dying and only used for "classical" looks (as evidenced by all those trendy "artistic" watchfaces that frequently don't even have marks), then I suspect it'll be another lie of a generation, just like I've been told to learn how to do math in my head because "there won't be any calculators around".

I mean, analog watchfaces are bad at telling precise time - it's just that there wasn't anything better until quite recently (and people are typically fine with 5-minute precision). They're great for conceptualizing time intervals (easy to mentally picture a pie chart), but I strongly suspect most people when asked "when is the next meeting?" are reading time then doing the arithmetic rather than reading the interval directly.

I could be wrong, of course.

Analogue clocks are helpful in low visibility situations. I have one in my bathroom because when I first wake up my vision is too blurry to see the clock, but I can see where the hands are and know what time it is. They are also handy when the clock needs to be far away, like outside in the yard. You can read an analog clock from much farther away than a digital clock because you just need to make out the general positions of the hands.

Also, it's a great way to teach kids multiples of five and fractions. :)

And multiples of 12, don't forget that!

The Babylonians were masters of division-based math, when the purpose was to divide things up into equal parts.

Started to fade from fashion when economics became about making things grow (increase the pie) rather than divide what they had (slice the pie).

While analog watches aren't as precise, they are faster. It takes most people less time to process, as humans (apparently)[1] can interpret an image faster than numbers.

For example, 189/304 vs [####__]; the latter is probably faster to process.

Also, not related to clocks, but analog gauges in particular: a number lacks an important vector of information: rate of change.

[1] https://books.google.nl/books?id=nrtUgKzFhJ4C&pg=SA7-PA16&lp...

> For example, 189/304 vs [####__]; the latter is probably faster to process.

That’s an excellent analogy. If digital were as quick to process, we would simply have data tables everywhere and no need for data charts.

Honestly, I have a contradicting personal experience. For me, it takes me an order of magnitude longer to process an analog watchface into a numerical reading, than just glance over a digital watchface directly (over a second versus a few hundred milliseconds).

For the progress bars (or, say, tank level gauges) it totally makes sense - I like them the same way you've presented, it's easier to ingest [####__] (or, better, [####__]62%, so it can be also spelled out if someone's asking) than 189/304.

Linked book doesn't open for me, but I agree that this also applies to various instruments, especially in aviation, where IFR is of extreme importance. Though for a car I've picked mine specifically based on having a clear large digital speedometer (because unlike on an aircraft, cars 101% rely on seeing outside) and I'm always interested in speedometer reading for answering "how fast I'm going, exactly?" (speed limit comparison is a no-brainer, and with a precise reading I can maintain speed at +/-1mph of the desired target, which is impossible with an analog speedometer) rather than "am I slowing down or speeding up?" (I see this already).

But watches - when using for telling time - aren't really gauges, are they? Analog watchfaces can be (and are, by some) used as a gauge when measuring time intervals ("how long had passed", "how much time left"?), but again, like I wrote, I suspect that most people read the time then do the arithmetic rather than imagining a pie chart.

> , I suspect that most people read the time then do the arithmetic rather than imagining a pie chart.

depends how the person was trained, my friend.

Of course, yes. And I merely "suspect" rather than have some concrete statistics to back this up.

I have this suspicion based on a few anecdotal data points plus the fact that digital watchfaces are becoming more and more common (phones and computers specifically), and people love to do things in an uniform manner.

But I'm very biased here (and thus could be wrong), because I strongly dislike classic analog watchfaces. I'm certainly for novel approaches - I do like Apple Watch's "Solar" watchface (the digital version), as it has a digital reading centered in essentially a gauge that shows the Sun's motion, allowing to see the time relative to the daylight. Similarly, I enjoy calendar and weather widgets that show the day as a timeline, so I can see how events or weather conditions approach. But I'm always asking myself "what time is it now?" first (and "ok, how long until...?" only comes after, even if it was the original intent) - it was my mental model for as long as I remember myself - so I strongly prefer digital 24-hour displays.

> (as evidenced by all those trendy "artistic" watchfaces that frequently don't even have marks)

If you grew up reading analog time, these aren't at all hard to read, even to the minute. Really, it's not an affectation, I would find a mark-less analog watch faster to grok than a digital watch. Most people who grew up on analog watches will similar have no problem with them.

The only kinds of watches that are more about "rough" time are ones without marks and without a minute hand. Those I can only read to about 15 minutes.

I do like it for the hour hand. The bend in the hand shows both that it is still the previous hour and that it is nearing a change.

However the minute hand only moving every 5min isn't great.

The real solution is they should say “a quarter to four”. ;)

When it's 2:00 and someone asks me what time it is, I say it's a quarter of 8:00.

A lot of engineering students make that mistake when learning to read log graph paper, I guess we never grow out of that kind of thinking.

It solves the problem of the child getting the wrong answer until they have to read a real mechanical clock.

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